Whether or not I actually get paid to [act] is totally irrelevant to me.
Pop Up cast, complete with inflatable Jaberwock.
Photo: Tanya Lake
Lewis Carroll's Jabberwock and crazy krump dancing collide on a suburban Sydney street.
Aliens have invaded the building, they say. Saturday afternoon shoppers in Carlton can't help but be bemused. The Pop Up! cast are doing their first full run and are at the stage where the action takes place outside the Shopfront Theatre.
Director T. J. Eckleberg watches intently, cajoling and suggesting in rapid fire. "We're gonna do this, kind of, on a performance energy level," he announces to his young cast of 13, before correcting himself: "Actually, not kind of. Performance energy!"
It's a first run, and there aren't enough CD decks, someone bought the wrong kind of blank disks, a speaker has blown, the lights aren't in yet and the video isn't right, but Shopfront's interior has been successfully transformed into a strange world of twisted black plastic.
The cast, aged 16 to 25, surpass their director's instruction while taking the moving performance from the street to the foyer, outdoors to the courtyard and, finally, into the theatre.
The show includes hip-hop, the crazy krump dance, suspended plastic birth pods and giant puppets from visual theatre company eRTH.
Lewis Carroll's Jabberwock appears several times, once in German ("Es brillig war. Die schlichten Toven"). At one point, two of them, debating their school-formal dates, are played by small, video-projected puppets, which are knock-offs of the scary Beijing Olympics mascots found in a $2 shop.
There are also personal stories, located in the here and now of Sydney's southern suburbs. Each performer's story starts with the latitude and longitude of its location, leading to the afternoon's longest-running argument: is latitude north-south or east-west?
Project dramaturge Kris Plummer eventually settles the dispute: "I looked it up on the internet, and I won my Year 9 geography prize." Unarguable.
The stories are from real young people, so are the aliens a metaphor?
"[The show] is primarily about the relationship between young people and their parents and carers," Eckleberg says. "What points of independence and dependence do they find within their own lives and how do they negotiate that autonomy? When do you become your own person, when are you still obligated and connected and what do all those relationships mean?"
Parents as inescapable weird aliens, sure - but why the Jabberwock?
"[Jabberwocky] is about a young boy who's told he can't achieve something, that he can't slay the Jabberwock," says 19-year-old cast member Sam Dalley. "He throws all that information aside, and does what people believe he can't do."
Eckleberg: "It's a journey that all young people at some point are faced with. They either have to face their fear or face themselves or face their parents or face the unknown.
"You don't quite understand what's happening in that poem, but yet you understand perfectly. And that's the journey of Pop Up! You keep seeing these scenes, and you don't understand who did what, when and exactly why they did it, but by the end of it you get this sense of confrontation and reconciliation and having to face something you otherwise wouldn't have faced."
Cast member Elise Nandan, 16, says: "We're all at different levels of exploration, we've all got different ages and different circumstances. So instead of presenting one view, we're able to use the aliens to present so many views."
Nandan says her experience with Shopfront, which formed 30 years ago, has been liberating: "It's not restrictive, it's not, 'Do this, do that'; it's not like school or NIDA drama. It's free, it takes us to different areas, it makes us work with people we otherwise wouldn't work with, it shows you that different things are possible."
Nandan and Dalley want to continue performing, but neither has shallow dreams of acting celebrity.
"I've got a mission to keep doing this,'' Dalley says. "Whether or not I actually get paid to do it is totally irrelevant to me. If I can achieve getting paid to do this, bring it on. But that's not important.''
Tonight to August 27, 7.30pm, Shopfront Theatre, Carlton (shows starts at corner of Grey Street and Carlton Parade), 9588 3948, $18/$12.